Scattered

as somethings just are

In memoriam. Because as bitter as endings are someone once told me nothing is sweeter than nostalgia. To the poems and moments that became a whole life, a small infinite.

Then

It has been almost a year here. I have tried to find myself somewhere smudged between the lines and the unconscious creation that my streams from my finger tips into the typefaces of this screen. Somewhere along the way I found myself in the practice, not on the pages. I have gone weeks without consistently publishing. I try not to pressure myself after all, I was doing the thing that makes any of this compelling to my future self. I always feel like an oily film of naivety coats my words. Will youth paint me a fool? Am I already doing that. I am the same as I was last year, but perhaps surrounded by better.

Phenomenon

Do you light up

Do you light up when you see me?

Ghosts seep from the edges of inseams, the once a foreboding drip turned to rushing water.

There is a parking lot in a strip mall tucked into the foothills of the sierra nevadas - it lives with me through all my memories of adolescence. There was romance in its authenticity — I no longer know if it haunts me or if I am the ghost living in cold comfort of nostalgia. In the recesses of my mind I can see the steel blue of the sky, relaxing from the storm it held — absorbing the orange warmth of a singular street light. It’s quiet surrender and inevitable death - a flicker of hope and bittersweetness. The concrete a patchy mirror to the cobalt sky tearing itself free from the disheartened storm. I have little doubt that the end of the world feels like that town. My solace in those dreary days was my day dreams of my crush. I was a romantic at too young of an age. That sentiment/sensitivity is one of the only things that has allowed me to feel tangible. It is the only part of myself I can remember to hold onto.

When I see a cabbage white flutter into the grass, a brief respite, I think of you.

When gloom sets in and I yearn for home, I smell pistachios — I imagine the warm light of my room wrapped in maroon sheets - arms around me.

Thunderstorms can now only be a reminder of a late night in New York and coming back home.

The seasons change so rapidly, forcing momentum onto me when I’ve never wanted to be more still.

I love when brightness blankets my room, but they have remained dim for the past 6 months.

Are lilacs still your favorite flower?

Cuz I picked them

And I brought them here

Do you still get heart flutters

Butterflies

I’m watching and wondering

Be that easy

As my hair grows to embody my mother’s curls and I contend with the fact that I am shaped like a woman. I grieve the pessimistic realism she has sewn into little grooves of my mind. My hope fights it everyday but I will be 25 soon I am reminded how much I have taken on my parents

My mother’s sensitivity and my fathers quietude in his suffering and grief

Their romance is the only thing that has enlightened my life with hope

Despite everything how much they love each other

It has given me a quiet naïve attitude toward relationships

I assume sincerity from strangers I offer mine in return in hope

I try to love my friends as if they are family

I try to love my partner as if he is family

I wonder if I think too much

Funny

I’m excited for the sunrise of wrinkles on my skin. Dusk seems to suit the anxious right? Some aging to mold me into something people have to listen to rather than just see - but perhaps they’ll just see an old lady.

Hopefully this sentimentality will not be my executioner.

Hauntings

Winter beaches

As you grow you realize how experience really shapes you

Winter beaches are such a reminder to me of gungun

The wave crests

Breaking in the air

The wind carrying sea mist into the atmosphere

Until it is rolled up pulled back into its home land become ing a lull of the sea until temper rises

Swelling with momentum

Once again submitting to its own history

We are creatures of habit the sea and I

I find myself in a lull

Some currents swelling

Old feelings rising again

I remind myself that waves won’t crest as high this time

I yearn for the stillness and calm that breaking into the sand a final time will bring

Not to confuse myself for the calamity of my own anxieties and insecurities

Blue steel, cold and liquid breaks the monotony of the brown sand

In the hope for the future I have felt myself slipping out of time

Forgetting the space I occupy

Stone Statues

There is a wood beam that supports the frames of the local coffee shop on orcas island. It has small circular perforations ridges riding along it like brush strokes on canvas. I imagine it to be sourced from the hidden confines of a winter beach like a child stumbling upon a treasure chest of ancient relics.

Sand, salt & time slowly leaving their scattered constellations and prayers along its body. For it to all end up here, my fingers running down it — dust giving away falling into my nail beds. To be as still as a wood beam — always witness to the stories that pass around it. I envy its stillness. I envy the stories that make it everlasting.

I found escapism as a moss, it flourishes in my dreary seasons, creeping into the noisiness of my world. As soon as it starts it never ends. Until it does. The busy-ness is an observation granted to me on the trip I had - I’ve been trying to practice slowing it down. Though it has overtaken the rock beds and the north faces of the trees — it’s still at home in me, and I need to be true to it.

M

The way mountains curb into the valleys and the clouds cast off — hibernating in nooks

Some reaching back up carried by the wind

On the horizon the river reaches down

Crystal and silver illuminated in sunlight

Rushed to the west for it’s own sanity

Getting scraped by the mountains

Ridges ripping through its current

the remnants are striated peaks

Ghost town

Dragonflies surf summer winds that I know carry a thunderstorm into pink ombré skies

Horizons look painted

if I didn’t know my town better this would be serene

But heavy teal lifts to dusty pink and bats scurry into twilight

The wind shuns itself from what’s to come

I head inside to escape the violent sorrow of summer

Lopez

The way the early morning sun streams through the birch leaves orange and golden

Light teasing the early yawns of fall

Golden moss mummifies its surroundings— a menacing neighbor

Blackberry bushels suspend brevity

Cobwebs blanket thistles and string light into purple threads

Giving the site a haunting

On the boat

I like that I can find him in crowds

I like the feeling of looking for him

I see myself in strangers

I find my memory on the edge of the deck

She looks through the water and I know Alaska is home in her

Darker dorsal fins crest moving the ocean along with them

How the breeze cups the class of the pines bereaved and heavy — indignation

The sages of time — forever casting a final judgement on the lives that move underneath them

They tower over us

Seemingly decades of growth happening before our eyes

And still their leafy hands droop

Things got really luminescent

Too sharp and too bright

Solar flaire

A symphony of cicadas accompany us in the heat

Ghost seagulls haunt us back to the origin

The wind screams through the railings

Water jumping out like sardines caught in a net

Trying to escape the velocity of this metal monster

Olympic orchids

Night flyer

Tropic of cancer

bold fruity amber resin sticks to your fur

You feel the foreboding whispers dusk brings

In your warning I can only retreat